Goodbye, Slowlane

As I noted yesterday, Jay Massey has taken down slowlane.com and Peter Baylies is transferring much of the applicable content to athomedad.com. It's an acknowledgement of the obvious and probably a healthy thing for the at-home dad community in general.

It's hard to imagine this now, but there was a time when slowlane was really the hub for all things at-home dad. It was central to the communication and planning around the At-Home Dad Convention, it encouraged and supported dads groups around the country, and it gave a forum to dads across the world. It published some of the best writing on fatherhood and managed to keep up -- for a time -- with media coverage and highlight resources. It was a one-stop shop. To the extent that there is anything approaching a national community of at-home dads, Jay deserves a good deal of credit.

But it was time for the site to go -- in addition to its virtual abandonment over the past five years, the growth of the web has made sites like slowlane less important. And while I celebrate the efforts of the guys behind athomedad.org to build the same kind of critical mass, they will have a massively harder time. When I started this blog about five years ago, there was nothing on the web for at-home dads beyond slowlane and a wonderful (now defunct) site called Being Daddy. Now there are all kinds of groups and blogs and forums and resources spread out all over the place. It's not one-stop shopping, but there is a richness and variety that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

I wish Peter the best of luck culling through the debris -- I'm sure there will be some real gems there -- and Jay the best of luck as he focuses on what's next.

And -- as always -- if you have a resource for at-home dads that I haven't yet linked to, please drop me a line.